Dear Editor: The city of Mountain View claims to have a AAA credit rating in its current newsletter, The View. This is terribly misleading to investors, residents and prospective homebuyers.

There are currently no bonds out against the city, especially with the highest possible rating.

Mountain View does, however, have three bonds out against Shoreline Regional Park Community (listed in the city budget) that are rated single A and have received a “negative credit watch.”

The park district is $56.3 million in debt now and paying a higher interest rate, and at the same time giving away $14 million to the school districts. This is totally wrong.

Donald Letcher,

Mountain View

Drone madness

Dear Editor: As we approach the festive season, we should take a few moments and reflect on what our government and our tax dollars are doing in our names.

According to CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, our drone war has intensified under Nobel Peace Prize winner President Barack Obama.

We continue to trample international law and invade the sovereignty of other countries, killing predominantly innocent civilians. We continue to launch our unmanned drones from remote safe U.S. locations completely oblivious of the devastating impact they have on people’s lives. We use grotesque language, such as surgical strikes, to blunt criticism and deflect the mind-numbing truth from entering into our consciousness.

A Stanford/New York University and Bureau of Investigative Journalism report titled “Living Under Drones” dispels the myth perpetuated by U.S. government officials that drones have a high degree of accuracy. On the contrary, the stark reality is that 98 percent of the victims are ordinary citizens. To compound the terror, first responders are paralyzed with fear, lest they become the target of a second strike.

Clive Smith, director of human rights organization Reprieve, stated: “Pakistan’s way of life is collapsing: Kids are too terrified to go to school, adults are afraid to attend weddings, funerals, business meetings, or anything that involves gathering in groups. Yet there is no end in sight, and nowhere the ordinary men, women and children of North West Pakistan can go to feel safe.”

Let’s raise our collective voices and demand an immediate end to this madness.

Jagjit Singh,

Los Altos

Fiscal cliff

Dear Editor: Recently, C-SPAN is repeatedly playing the testimony by the respected economists Mark Zandi and Kevin Hassett in front of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress regarding the fiscal cliff. Those who want to know which way our country is headed in order to plan their future accordingly would benefit greatly from watching it; all one has to do is compare that testimony with President Obama’s latest rhetoric on the same subject in order to make a good decision. Isn’t life wonderfully simple?

Virgil Stevens,

San Carlos

Islamic extremism

Dear Editor: The intellectually honest among us must accept that Israel’s announcement of plans to build 3,000 housing units on a bare hillside outside Jerusalem which, in every peace proposal presented to Arab Palestinians, would have been retained by Israel, is not worthy of the media attention it has generated. In the sheer number of words devoted to it, current media attention suggests that an Israeli civilian house is much more deadly than an Islamic nuclear bomb or Syrian chemical weapons.

The vulgar hackneyed rhetoric from the Arab side is that not one inch of “Palestine” will be surrendered to the Jews. This is not reactive. It is ingrained in Islamic thinking. Israel’s crime is to exist. Current unification efforts show the Palestinian Authority and Hamas now harmonize with an Islamic voice and any moderation was a facade.

The Islamist genie is out of the bottle. Knowing what he knew personally about Islam, could President Obama really not have known that his encouragement of the Egyptians, Libyans and Tunisians to rise up and change their world would buck the odds?

There never was a solution to what is now an international problem of Islamic extremism. But only a chump would continue to blame Israel’s existence or behavior as the cause of problems in the Middle East. If that doesn’t convince you, consider that Israeli war songs invariably speak of peace, and Arab war songs speak of, well, war.

WASHINGTON – Hillary Clinton challenged Congress on Thursday to combat fake and misleading news on social media, using a post-election appearance to tackle an issue that gripped her presidential campaign and culminated with a shooting incident Sunday in Northwest Washington.